


every moment sings of some disbelief

by mysilenceknot



Series: colliding on a backdrop of blue [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dissociation, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Queerplatonic Relationships, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-24 22:53:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3787357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysilenceknot/pseuds/mysilenceknot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes reality is relative.<br/>Natasha navigates dissociative episodes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every moment sings of some disbelief

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in response to a dissociative episode I recently experienced (after months of _not_ experiencing dissociation) and shows only a few examples of what dissociation can look like. General warnings for mental illness, specifically depersonalization and derealization in connection with dissociation. title comes from [Little Worrier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYMimowF8g) by Kina Grannis.

Sometimes it feels like floating. 

\--

Natasha is talking to Fury and then suddenly she is  _not_. Her body is still talking, still going through the motions, and she’s watching from above. She knows she should still try to pay attention to what’s being said but at the same time it’s nice to drift away into a place where everything’s soft and warm and nothing can hurt her. Besides, her body will still store at least fragments of the conversation. She can figure out the rest later.

Fury dismisses her and as she watches her body turn and walk away, she knows she should try to return to it. Natasha really doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to be herself, doesn’t want to go on another mission right now. She wants to exist in this place where she has no past, has no future, has nothing that can possibly remove this feeling of peace she’s fallen into.

Experience, however, has taught her that it's better for her to choose to be re-grounded into reality than to be yanked back into it.

So she lets her body walk until it finds a quiet place: an empty bathroom on the Helicarrier with a lock on the door. Natasha locks the door, takes a deep breath and lets her eyes close. 

Her arms hang loosely at her sides and she takes control of them first. Each finger extends, then relaxes. Her hands twist up with her wrist, her elbows bend in and out, her shoulders rise and fall. 

She lift both arms up and reaches for the ceiling, then bends at the waist and touches her toes. She stands straight up again, then wiggles her toes. She raises each leg at the knee, kicking her leg out once before standing on the ground again.

For a while she would try to use the ballet positions she’d learned as a child, quickly going from one to five in the hopes they’d jar her back to reality. But it never worked, always seeming to extend her lack of presence. These stretches are better for peaceful reemergence and today she has that luxury. 

It doesn’t take very long for her to feel resettled in her body. She splashes cool water on her face as she processes the pieces of conversation that she wasn’t fully present for. Natasha ignores the slight discomfort that's rising as her perceptions and undercurrent of emotions come back, trying not to be unhappy about the internal calm seeping away.

She leaves the bathroom. There are orders to follow.

\--

It rarely feels like floating.

\--

Natasha watches her body weave through the ballroom. 

Maybe it’s good she has no control of it because all she feels like doing is screaming.

Her mission is to retrieve information from one of the guests at this gala, whom she’d kept in her sight for the past two hours. Everything had been going according to plan, giving her hope that this extraction would be done quickly with relatively little violence. Things were fine until she’d taken a sip from her wine glass.

She lost control.

Her job forced her to be exposed to the vast majority of triggers she’d developed, causing her to develop new ways of managing them when they came up.  So what were the odds, really, that in the middle of a mission she’d be triggered by  _wine_ of all things?

Natasha's body is moving and her face is stuck in a smile and she has no control over anything. She wants to go into a quiet place where she can drop the act for two minutes so she can do something violently grounding, but she cannot lose contact with the target.

It’s bad timing. Her skin is tingling as if she'd been trying to fight out of a hot cocoon of wool blankets. The flare of anxiety that popped up once she tasted the wine is still sitting in her chest and won’t die down, won’t let go of it’s hold on her. Her thoughts are racing, going from the cathedral that she’d set on fire five years ago to how easy it’d be to kill the target with the blade in her heel right now to how she’ll never actually be free from herself and will run for the rest of her life. 

To be completely honest, Natasha’s pissed.

The SHIELD mandated therapist she’d once been forced to see for two weeks insisted that dissociation was one for the mind to cope with stress and danger. A coping mechanism that developed to deal with difficult and life-threatening situations.

She wasn’t in any danger before her mind decided to separate from her body. And now she was. Awesome.

Why is her brain such  _shit_? She wants to scream, wants to cry, wants to be back in her fucking body instead of feeling like it's trailing two steps behind her. It’s the ultimate betrayal to lose control during the moments when having a sense of control is crucial.

Natasha watches her target step out of the ballroom. Her body follows. It walks quickly but quietly down the hallway, staying close to the right wall. The target enters a door to a stairwell and as Natasha follows, her bare arm brushes against the decorative wood paneling on the wall.

She’s back.

Natasha has to stop for a second, resting a hand on the wall as she lurches back into reality. The panic is still in her chest, she feels slightly nauseous, and her mind is still screaming, but she’s back. Her body is her own and it’s not moving on autopilot and it’s responding perfectly to what she’s telling it to do.

She’s in complete control of her exterior again. There's a mission to finish.

\--

The two major types of dissociation are depersonalization and derealization.

Natasha's better at dealing with the first type.

She’s been navigating personal reality shifts for years and while it can be terrifying, it’s generally a simple inconvenience. It’s annoying to not feel like a real person, especially with a history of being boxed into incorrect descriptions of who she is.

Being able to recognize that she’s in a dissociated state theoretically should make her feel less terrible when it happens.

It doesn’t.

\--

“Is any of this real?” Natasha asks.

“What?” Sam responds.

She hadn’t meant to say that aloud. Natasha opens her eyes and leans her head up so she can look at Sam, who’s sitting at the other end of the couch with a book in his hands and her feet in his lap. It’s one of her rare off days and she’d given herself permission to lounge. But as her thoughts had been constantly twisting themselves and were now casting doubt on her memories, maybe staying inside all day was a terrible idea.

“I just. I don’t know. This doesn’t seem real.” She struggles to find the words. “I mean, you’re here, I guess, but who are you?”

This is different than what usually happens. She knows what to do and, for the most part, what to expect when her mind decides to take a vacation from her body. Right know she knows who she is, knows where she is. She knows that she is a woman with many identities and too many secrets. She knows that she’s currently in the house that she shares with three other people. Her body and mind remain firmly linked.

However, for the last hour nothing else had felt completely solid and she has absolutely no ideal what to do about that.

“Who do you think I am?” Sam asks cautiously.

“I don’t know. Like, I think you’re my friend but are you really? Do you actually care about me?”

Natasha does not like this. Not at all. She can feel herself physically starting shake so she swings her legs off of Sam’s lap and stands up. “I’m sorry. I know who you are, you’re Sam Wilson, you fly around in the sky and kick ass. But.” Her hands rub her face as she takes a step back from the couch. “I’m not making any sense, I’m sorry.”

Her body is reacting as if she’s undergoing some sort of sensory overload, but the entire world is muted. Maybe she’s making all of this up and this is how the world usually feels, neutral and cold. 

“Hey. You’re okay,” Sam says, putting down his book as he slowly stands up. “I’m real and I’m really here. I’m your friend and your partner and the guy who knows how to make a perfect omelette. I’ve cared about you since you and Steve showed up at my place looking like hell.”

It had been a rather casual yet sudden thought, her wondering if anything else existed. Having moments where she wondered if her experiences were real and not a figment of an overactive imagination weren’t that unusual, but this had felt different. And as the thought had morphed she began to feel less and less certain that any of her newer memories were real. Did anything after she left Russia happen? And if it hadn’t happened, why was she in this house? How did she know that Steve was with Bucky at one of their appointments? 

Everything was twisted. Each train of thought she tried to follow led to a hazy end.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” she says, her voice betraying her panic. “This doesn’t feel like it normally does and I haven’t dissociated in at least six months and I don’t. I don’t know.”

"Do you have any grounding techniques?”

“Yeah but I don’t see how they’ll help. I’m  _me_ , I’m in my body, but I can’t tell if you’re real still. What you said makes sense, but it also doesn’t. Maybe I’m making all of this up."

“Natasha.” Sam lightly touches her arm. “You’re not making me up. I’m real. You’re real. I’m not something you made up”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Natasha grabs his left bicep and closes her eyes. She focuses on slowing her breathing and letting herself be connected to the world around her. Sam is real. And if Sam is real, the memories she has that have him in them must also be real. Which makes Steve real, makes Bucky real, makes Fury and Maria and everything connected to SHIELD real.

It’s unsettling to go from being convinced that everything else is fake to understanding how true the world is. Her skin is still tingling but her breathing and thinking has gone back to normal. She opens her eyes again and cracks a small smile at Sam, who’d been standing still and silent as she recentered herself. “Well. That was fun and emotionally draining.”

Sam laughs and pulls her into a tight hug. “Are you exhausted now?”

“Not quite, but I’m sure it’ll hit me at any second.” She pulls out of his embrace and flops back onto the couch. “God, I hate this. And I’d been doing so well.”

“Aren’t you the one who always tells Bucky that wellness is a relative concept?” Sam asks, sitting next to her. She leans into his shoulder. “Yeah, but every concept is relative. And that fucking sucked.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Natasha closes her eyes with a sigh. “And there’s the exhaustion hitting.”

“Understandable. Would it help if I stayed here as you fell asleep? I know being around other people helps keep me grounded after an episode but that doesn’t work for everyone.”

“Yeah, that’d be good. Thank you, Sam.” She feels his lips lightly brush against her forehead.

“You’re welcome.”

\--

Sometimes Natasha's life is an absolute disaster. 

Yet, as much as reality sucks, it's nice to be able to sense it.


End file.
